What can 🇮🇳 do to get ahead
Here’s some unsolicited advice to the government on what to do to help boost India’s sovereign model story.
1. Mandate domestic models for all non-critical functions
Government needs to be a guaranteed buyer for homegrown models. There are tons of applications that don’t require SOTA performance. (To be clear, for mission-critical use-cases, using anything other than SOTA would be a shortsighted decision).
China got ahead because of their domestic demand (Anthropic and OpenAI models don’t work there).
2. Release massive distillations of chain-of-thought of SOTA Chinese models on diverse prompts (and post-process to remove China bias)
Inference is easy and cheap. So the government should simply create a national public repository of SOTA reasoning chains in order to prevent each model creator doing it separately. Centralize and absorb the cost.
Thinking Machines (US company) did finetuning on Kimi 2.5 to bootstrap reasoning. Indian model companies would do the same, and government can help by footing the bill.
3. Procure diverse RL environments and release them publicly
Modern frontier models train on 100k+ RL environments having 10s of tasks each. These RL environments are driving most of the progress. Model companies pay billions of dollars for procuring them. Government should simply centralize and absorb this cost.
4. Give full travel sponsorship to Indian authors with A* conference accepts
If an Indian gets into NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR main conference, simply sponsor them to attend the conference to present their paper. It’s rounding error in govt’s budget as ~100 Indian papers get into such conferences (0.3% of 5353 papers at ICLR 2026), but would go a long way in establishing a culture of basic R&D which is required to go beyond the frontier in next 5-10 years.
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